nNovels galore
In 1990 England’s leading secondhand bookseller, Booth of Hay-on-Wye, calculated
that the gross number of new titles of all kinds published since 1960 exceeded the
number published before 1960. This is bad news for a historian of contemporary
literature, who is also a valuer of secondhand books; 200,000 new titles are produced
in the UK each year. Bookselling has become much more of a mass-market business
than it was a generation ago, and has escaped from the pious supposition that it had
some obligation to literature. Airport bookstalls and the windows of bookselling
chains are piled high with the latest bestsellers, many of them exploiting celebrity
established elsewhere: the (ghosted) autobiographies of idols of the media and
leisure industries: film stars, pop musicians, fooballers, catwalk queens, TV presen-
ters. Celebrity-worship affects the compliments paid by the young: ‘You are a star!
You are a legend!’
In 2005 a journalist aged 70 was paid the first instalment of an advance of
£5,000,000 to ghost the first of five volumes of the autobiography of a 20-year-old
England footballer, Wayne Rooney. As the newspapers like to say on such occa-
sions, ‘You couldn’t make it up’, though the journalist may have had to do so. The
fiction which is piled highest is composed and marketed as the latest example of a
formula which is readily convertible into visual forms. The formula is rarely as
innocent as the recipe of J. K. Rowling (see p. 432), reportedly the richest woman
in Britain.
Publishing has been a business since Caxton, more obviously so since the
patron gave way to the publisher in the eighteenth century. The remaining vestiges
ofnon-commercial patronage were those offered by Governmental agencies such
as the Arts Council, the British Council, the state-subsidized theatre, and, less
obviously but more lastingly, the educational industry: the examination boards
which put cer tain texts on their syllabuses, and the books set for reading by
universities. With the abolition of the Net Book Agreement in 1995, publishers
now sell most of their books at a discount not through bookshops but through
other outlets and deals,at airports, and increasingly through internet booksellers
and e-book suppliers. Small bookshops and literary magazines are disappearing.
Most fiction (even some literary fiction) is now sold in much the same way as
shampoo or hamburgers. Newspaper reviews of books are nearly as unreliable as
the quotes on theatre billboards. It is good thing that reading groups flourish. If
more books are bought than ever before, is not that a good thing? That may
depend on their quality.
Criticism is hard pressed to keep up with this glut. Dr Johnson’s question ‘Do you
read books through?’ might be put to the celebrities who list the Books of the Year,
to the judges of the growing number of literary prizes, and to the academic assessors
of the research quality of English departments. The growth in direct mail, newsprint
and publishing prompts the reaction: ‘Do I need to read this?’ Book Weeks also
flourish, often calling themselves Literature Festivals. Acclaimed novels do not
always stand up well if re-read twenty years later; books which are better on re-read-
ing last longer. In these difficult conditions, an account of the bubbling surface of the
modern fiction market must be highly selective and offer brief and provisional
comments.
NOVELS GALORE 387